Carlos Jimenez

Carlos Jimenez has extensively dealt with marine ecology and environmental research since the early 80s. He holds a B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees in biology and aquatic and marine ecosystems, respectively, from the University of Costa Rica. He also holds a Ph.D. in Marine Biology obtained at the Leibniz-Zentrum für Marine Tropenökologie (ZMT) at the University of Bremen (Germany).

After completion of his Ph.D. in 2002, he started a postdoc research that studied climate signals, past and present, in skeletons of corals from Cuba. He participated in several international research initiatives and also maintained and expanded his long-term projects on the recovery of coral reefs. Between 2006 and 2009, Carlos coordinated eight major coral research projects at the Pacific and Caribbean coasts of Costa Rica with the participation of undergraduate and graduate students from Europe and Latin America. Topics of particular interest were environmental reconstruction using corals, exploration and evaluation of never before visited reef habitats, and mass mortality of corals due to harmful algal blooms and invasive species.

Since Autumn 2009, Carlos has been a permanent resident of Cyprus where he initiated efforts to evaluate the coralligenous habitats of the island from the historical perspective of natural (e.g. tsunamis) and anthropogenic (e.g. eutrophication) disturbances, and to investigate deep-water corals. He is also doing palaeoecological reconstructions of fossil coral reefs, advising students and collaborating in multidisciplinary research initiatives (e.g. underwater archaeology).

Carlos particular goal is to place the coralligenous research in Cyprus in the geographical perspective of the Levantine and Mediterranean Basins. He has more than 30 peer-reviewed publications in periodical journals and books.

Research Interests

Effects of natural and anthropogenic disturbances on marine ecosystems, environmental history using biological and historical sources, and exploration of cold-water coralligenous habitats.